Alex White Plume was awakened about 6 a.m. on 24 August 2000 by a helicopter over his home near Manderson on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.[1] Outside, roughly 25 armed agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Northern Plains Safe Trails Drug Task Force prepared to cut the industrial-hemp crop he had tended since spring for a Slim Buttes Land-Use Association housing project.[1][2]
Plants removed, no arrests
Agents cut and trucked away 3,782 plants from White Plume’s 1.5-acre plot, according to Rapid City Journal reporting republished by CannabisNews.[1] They also raided a second 50-foot-square plot near Slim Buttes marked as an Oglala Sioux Tribe Department of Agriculture experimental site.[1] Indianz.com said almost 4,000 plants were taken across the two farms and that no one was arrested, although federal law allows ten years to life for cultivating 1,000 or more plants.[2]
The Slim Buttes group had publicised the planting since April and invited tribal police to view the fields in July; a Bureau of Indian Affairs investigator had sent a sample to the University of Mississippi after a June overflight.[1] Tribal leaders passed an industrial-hemp ordinance in 1998, but U.S. law does not distinguish hemp from marijuana without a federal permit.[2] White Plume said the hemp was destined for building materials on the reservation; officials declined to comment on the case in the opened reports.[1][2]
